A New Politics - and New York City - is Possible
Zohran sprints towards the nomination and the deadly America-Israel aid scheme continues to unravel
“It always seems impossible until it's done”
These famous words were uttered by Nelson Mandela, one of the leading fighters against South African apartheid.
Mandela — political prisoner of almost 30 years, put on the American terror watch list (and kept there until 2008) — would eventually become the country’s prime minister with a free South Africa.
Now, those words are uttered again in a victory speech this past Tuesday by mayoral candidate, Zohran Kwame Mamdani, in a seemingly improbable win.
In one of the many highlights of campaign speeches by Mamdani, I believe the quoted portion below perhaps best illustrates what drives Mamdani’s political thinking:
I was born in Kampala, Uganda in East Africa. I was given my middle name, Kwame, by my father, who named me after the first prime minister of Ghana. And decades ago in Uganda, we won our independence from the British in 1962 and when we did, the United States government gave the Uganda government 23 scholarships as a gift for independence. And my father won one of those scholarships. He came to this country to study, to be an engineer at the University of Pittsburgh. And sometime into his studies, his faced buried in his book, he heard the words reverberate in the corridor around him — which side are you on? These were the words being sung by members of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, recruiting students to get on the bus to go to Montgomery, Alabama. My father got on that bus, he marched, he was hosed down, he was thrown in jail. He was given one phone call and he called the Ugandan ambassador to the United States. He said, “can you get me out of jail?” The ambassador said, “what are you doing in jail, we sent you there to study.” My father said, “you sent me here as a gift for our freedom, they are fighting for theirs, it’s one in the same.” And so I was raised with this understanding that freedom and fight for it is interconnected. As I look across this city today, I am reminded that freedom is only worth as much as our ability to exercise it.
Mamdani could have told a tale of his immigrant story, leading to his own personal glory, tapping into an often-used trope of rugged individualism leading to success.
Instead, he reframed the conversation towards a shared, universal commitment towards fighting for freedom, that spans across any one single border.
Mamdani’s victory is not just inspiring, but it is also a blueprint for a new political future that is possible.
If the Democrats or a political coalition wants to build a durable and strong movement that can challenge and defeat the reactionary right, look no further than the image below.
If you need help understanding this graph, allow me to provide further context. The chart compares the electorate between the 2025 and 2021 Democratic primary.
What you are seeing is the youth vote — in a high turnout election — walloping the older vote turnout.
The Zohran Mamdani campaign did something that many campaigns often talk about, but are seldomly able to do; they changed the electorate.
As the expression goes, victory has many fathers. You can credit the policy initiatives that the campaign highlighted, the successful use of social media to reach a broad audience, the army of canvassers and volunteers, and the candidate themselves, who never wavered on their views, building genuine authenticity to the public.
With little surprise, the right-wing in this country has begun spewing unadulterated racist bile, not dissimilar to what Barack Obama once faced.
More surprising, but also not actually, has been some Democrats, like Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, have gotten in on the bigotry-filled attacks against Mamdani.
All of this should be confusing to you. We’ve heard since the Trump election win that Democrats need to find a way to win back core constituencies that have been lost.
In Mamdani, they found a campaign that energized young people, got young-men to back him, crafted well-made social media videos that went viral, and didn’t give an inch to right-wing culture wars and stayed laser focused on issues of affordability.
This should be everything you would want in a rebrand effort for the party. Afterall, they all but christened current NYC mayor Eric Adams as the future of the Democratic Party when he narrowly became mayor (yes, there were red flags about Adams then, too).
What’s the difference this time?
Is it perhaps because Mamdani has largely embraced the popular energy behind ending the atrocities occurring in Gaza and actually fulfilling the promise of a Palestinian state? Is it because he labels himself as a democratic socialist, similar to the most popular politician in the United States? Or perhaps it’s because Mamdani is promising to challenge the unelected political actors in our society that have helped craft a society primed for someone like Donald Trump to waltz himself into power yet again?
In any case, the Democratic Party better decide real quick which direction they want to go in at this moment. Offramps away from a reactionary dominated society that will span decades will not continue to offer themselves up. Right now, there is a grassroots, organic, and energized group of people — not just the youngins — who are desperate for a political entity that will harness their hopes for the future. This movement cannot merely be coopted or steered into empty, symbolic gestures.
Zohran Mamdani, bearing some unforeseen circumstances, will be the next mayor of New York City. If Democrats take part in damaging his administration’s political successes, the voters that mobilized to put him into office will not forget or forgive.
Do not assume any “young” politician without the political commitments that Mamdani has will be able to reassemble a similar coalition of voters.
The same chants that Mamdani’s father heard when he was in the hallways of his university will either be loudly and affirmatively answered or come to haunt Democrats when 2028 swings around.
Which side are you on?
A Kill Cage Under the Guise of Aid
Earlier this year, award-winning journalist, Jeremy Scahill of Drop Site News, sounded the alarm about an aid distribution project, insidiously named the Gaza Humanitarian Fund, being developed by both the United States and Israel. Here is an excerpt of his warning:
And the last thing I’ll say about [the Gaza Humanitarian Fund], is Netanyahu and Bezalel Smotrich, who’s in the war cabinet, both said that the point of this is to lure Palestinians, as though they’re animals going into a cage, lure them with the bait of promise of aid, and then entrap them in the south of Gaza, where they can either kill them in an increasingly shrinking killing cage or lock that cage and ship them off to another country. They call it Trump’s plan, but actually it’s been Netanyahu’s life’s work to try to erase Palestinians as a people and as a territory.
Invisible to the national Western-media, Palestinian journalists have been reporting these exact acts taking place on a daily basis. In the month since the aid scheme began, over 500 Palestinians have been killed at fenced-in centers, with roughly 4,000 injured.
I’ve mentioned before that we are in a troubling period in journalism where the words of Palestinian reporters are not counted the same as their Western counterparts, let alone their actual lives. This holds true with this story, with it beginning to gain more attention due to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz (equivalent to our New York Times) writing an exposé on these almost ritualistic killings.
Here is what some Israeli soldiers stationed there have said about their time there:
“It's a killing field," one soldier said. "Where I was stationed, between one and five people were killed every day. They're treated like a hostile force – no crowd-control measures, no tear gas – just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars. Then, once the center opens, the shooting stops, and they know they can approach. Our form of communication is gunfire.
“We open fire early in the morning if someone tries to get in line from a few hundred meters away, and sometimes we just charge at them from close range. But there's no danger to the forces." According to him, "I'm not aware of a single instance of return fire. There's no enemy, no weapons." He also said the activity in his area of service is referred to as Operation Salted Fish – the name of the Israeli version of the children's game "Red light, green light".
"Gaza doesn't interest anyone anymore," said a reservist who completed another round of duty in the northern Strip this week. "It's become a place with its own set of rules. The loss of human life means nothing. It's not even an 'unfortunate incident,' like they used to say."
"Working with a civilian population when your only means of interaction is opening fire – that's highly problematic, to say the least," he told Haaretz. "It's neither ethically nor morally acceptable for people to have to reach, or fail to reach, a [humanitarian zone] under tank fire, snipers and mortar shells."
"Technically, it's supposed to be warning fire – either to push people back or stop them from advancing," he said. "But lately, firing shells has just become standard practice. Every time we fire, there are casualties and deaths, and when someone asks why a shell is necessary, there's never a good answer. Sometimes, merely asking the question annoys the commanders."
"You know it's not right. You feel it's not right – that the commanders here are taking the law into their own hands. But Gaza is a parallel universe. You move on quickly. The truth is, most people don't even stop to think about it."
"When we asked why they opened fire, we were told it was an order from above and that the civilians had posed a threat to the troops. I can say with certainty that the people were not close to the forces and did not endanger them. It was pointless – they were just killed, for nothing. This thing called killing innocent people – it's been normalized. We were constantly told there are no noncombatants in Gaza, and apparently that message sank in among the troops."
"My greatest fear is that the shooting and harm to civilians in Gaza aren't the result of operational necessity or poor judgment, but rather the product of an ideology held by field commanders, which they pass down to the troops as an operational plan."
The UN has called these “aid sites” a death trap and Doctors Without Borders demanded the dismantling of the organization, labeling it as “slaughter masquerading as humanitarian aid.”
The shadowy run and funded group has just gotten a boost from the Trump administration, with an additional $30 million in funding being given.
That is another bucket of our taxpayer money funding this project. It is a mystery why some might protest this.
With the war with Iran at least temporarily being halted (I wouldn’t hold my breath), attention needs to turn back to what continues to unfold in Gaza.
To end this morbid piece, it’s important to note the litany of attempts to obscure from this reality. There is an ongoing project to commit people towards atrocity denial and claim the very thing happening actually somehow isn’t happening. In fact, Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz have both claimed the reporting on these daily massacres as "blood libel."
It seems that when Netanyahu isn’t doing Holocaust revisionism, he likes to dabble in an alternative reality of what blood libel is.
Blood libel is an insidious lie of Jewish people using the blood of Christian children for religious rituals.
These lives in Gaza that are being taken away with hunger, bullets, and bombs are dead. And they are being killed by the military that Netanyahu ostensibly controls. This Israeli government appears intent on cynically wrapping itself in the Jewish history of pain until it wears itself unrecognizable to anyone.
Still, the Israeli government can lift its blockade of international journalists from entering Gaza, to observe for themselves the acts that are ongoing.
And yet, we know that isn’t likely to happen anytime soon.
Leave me a comment with your views and any stories I should cover next.